American Indian English
The Quinault Case
Grażyna J. Rowicka | Leiden University
The paper provides a qualitative real-time study of ancestral language transfer in the English spoken on the Quinault Indian Nation reservation in WA, USA, in the late 1960s and nowadays. The 1960s data come from archival recordings of mainly one bilingual elder, while the recent samples were recorded in 2004. Only the former exhibit some evident phonological and morpho-syntactic transfer. The present-day speech conforms to informal General American patterns, except for one new variable, the glottal replacement of voiceless stops. The latter is not attested in the archival material and is argued to involve an innovation. A similar phenomenon has been reported in several other American Indian English (AIE) varieties. This may imply that a shared AIE substratum is developing, based on non-standard English features rather than on specific ancestral language transfer features. Leap’s (1993) assertion that no general AIE variety is on the rise may be worth re-examination.
Keywords: American English dialects, American Indian English, bilingualism, language transfer, glottal replacement, coronal cluster simplification, unmarked past tense
Published online: 31 October 2005
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.26.3.04row
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.26.3.04row
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Cited by 6 other publications
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